Engineering at Mudflap

Building the best possible product is at the core of everything we do.

At Mudflap, we’re building an app that provides drivers of diesel-fueled vehicles instant fuel discounts. After working as the Chief Product Officer at Trucker Path, Sanjay (co-founder and CEO) realized that technology could be used to solve a larger industry problem. While big fleets get major fuel discounts thanks to their large gallon volumes, owner-operators and small fleets are often left to fend for themselves. He partnered with Sharon (co-founder and Head of Product), a former co-worker at Trucker Path, and thus in 2020 Mudflap was born. You can read more about it and how the app works here.

Our team is product-led with pragmatic engineering. In other words, engineers start with a problem we are trying to solve for customers, then use the best technology available to create solutions. While we’re a technology company that cares deeply about technology, we are not working just for technology’s sake. Instead, we are using it to solve serious supply chain issues and help owner-operated truck drivers stay in business.

As we build our platform, our engineering team prioritizes usability and high-quality solutions that are fast and reliable. We are laser-focused on giving customers a consistent experience whether they are at a small mom and pop fuel stop or a chain with hundreds of locations. Our recipe for success is straightforward: a great product plus our teams doing their best work.

We’re transforming the way truckers and fuel stops operate.

Traditionally, truckers would need to pay for diesel with fuel cards or credit cards. Not only do these come with a slew of extra fees, but they can also take time for applications and credit checks to be processed and exclude mom and pop fuel stops. By leveraging technology to take the hassle out of this experience, we’re completely reinventing the business and are at the forefront of a major technical overhaul of the trucking space. We charge zero fees and save drivers on average 40 cents per gallon, while connecting them with smaller owner-operators who can simultaneously grow their businesses.

As we expand, we’re looking at innovative ways to evolve into a platform that not only sells gas, but also offers a broader e-commerce platform for the trucking industry. Our goal is to create a new, digital wallet for truckers that goes beyond fuel, adding services such as repairs, maintenance, and insurance. What’s more, we recognize that electric vehicles will continue to transform the space and we’re well-positioned to stay ahead of the curve there, too.

Our engineers strike a balance between creating thoughtful updates and working quickly to make our product the best it can be. The team believes in data and running experiments, but we are also eager to make fast changes. We are not married to past practices and are always open to changing our approach and technical architecture to keep improving. For example, Vite/Vue3 was introduced as a separate frontend repo for a project. After the initial churn of figuring out how to approach the frontend, a new frontend team formed and began to write code quickly and refactor aggressively when newer patterns or tech was introduced.

Overall, we take full advantage of the diverse expertise of people from both inside and outside the industry. Our engineers combine their own technology with open-source platforms including Sidekiq, Redis, Postgres, and Metabase, to make sure we are always innovating. If you’re a curious thinker who wants to keep learning, definitely reach out!

Every person who joins – regardless of level – is a project owner.

As a lean team, there’s a unique opportunity for all of our engineers to have a significant impact on the product as we develop. We believe in a very flat organization – we have not introduced any middle management and are not building vertically. This means all employees at all levels meet and work with our co-founders and partners.

Engineers have end-to-end ownership, from discussing and evaluating project requirements to designing, building, and testing the solution, to deploying it to production, and using data to evaluate whether it’s meeting customers’ needs. For example, Nico, one of our software engineers, noticed a user pain point and took the initiative to create a new flow for cashiers at truck stops so they could fix transaction errors without needing to contact customer service. He solicited feedback from stakeholders, communicated regularly with our PM and designer, and made sure to reach out to others if he needed help figuring out parts of the codebase or was going to make a more drastic change. Ultimately, he pushed everything to production, monitored and fixed any bugs, and ensured that the feature went to plan. As he shares, “During the entire process of owning this feature, I felt empowered to dig into legacy code, find edge cases that had not been discussed, and even make changes to the user experience that had been there for a long time. There were a lot of moments where the expected experience wasn’t the one that had evolved over time, or the fix that we thought would work showed us another UX improvement to help our customers (internal and external) throughout the lifecycle of our purchase process.”

We’ve found clear product-market fit and are growing accordingly.

Since launching in 2020, we’ve expanded to over a thousand truck stops nationwide. Millions of truckers operate in the United States, but while the trucking industry is economically large, truckers themselves are typically underserved by technology. Customers are adapting to our new platform quickly, and we’re investing in growing our team to remain the leader in this space.

Currently, Mudflap is used by one out of four truckers in the United States and processes $2 billion in annual payment volume. Our revenue and product development are directly connected, which means that we are continuously investing back into our services and our people. We’ve raised $75 million so far and plan to double the size of our team in the next year!

We serve a two-sided marketplace and look to our customers’ needs to drive decision-making.

From day one, we’ve provided our product free to truckers. They lock in a fuel price in the app and we guarantee it for 24 hours, even if the price at the pump increases. Many truckers tell us this transparency around our discount pricing makes the difference between their businesses succeeding and failing. Mudflap is now a core part of truckers’ livelihoods, and we take that responsibility seriously. We often find the affinity truckers have for our product is emotional because it’s essential to their business.

Similarly, we’ve helped smaller fuel stations boost their visibility to attract more customers and increase their fuel sales. Previously, these truck stops would have to wait and hope that drivers would stop by on their own. With our app, drivers see these stops when they’re miles away. There are zero upfront costs or setup fees, no IT or POS Integration is required, and fuel stations can still set their own prices. We make money by charging low transaction fees, but in turn, these stations see a 40% average increase in driver traffic and increase the number of gallons sold in the first month by over 45K.

We maintain close relationships with customers on both sides of the marketplace by constantly monitoring and acting on their feedback and providing excellent customer service. The customer support team has not been offline since our company started in January 2020, as we know it’s critical to support our customers when they need us. Engineers are also heavily involved with our exclusive network of thousands of fuel stops. They often work directly with clients, from cashiers to the corporate office, to create a seamless user experience. At the end of the day, we’re building a long-term business to benefit all of our partners – truckers, fuel stops, investors, and employees alike.

The key to our success is scale.

We’re in a highly competitive industry that is evolving fast. Trucking is impacted by many external factors such as changes in oil prices and other geopolitical events. As a result, it’s crucial that we remain nimble and respond to issues beyond our control while still providing and improving our mission critical product.

Our first-mover advantage gives us an edge and we plan to continue innovating at a very high level. This means scaling quickly and effectively. Our engineers are focused on iterating at a rapid pace to see what works and what doesn’t. We often use A/B testing to ensure our customers are getting the best experience. Instead of slow release cycles, we want engineers to take calculated risks and we value speed over perfection.

Thanks to our rapid growth curve, the size of the engineering team and lines of code have also grown at a swift pace. Increased product use pushed the infrastructure and standard operating procedure around deployment to its limits. During this period of uncertainty, which has now passed, deciding when and what to deploy became a calculated risk. As the team focused on minimizing the impact to all of our users, engineers were encouraged to dig into what could potentially be the root cause and assess potential risks. If we determined that risk was low enough, we would then deploy with caution. Now, the team confidently handles our growth and is able to assess risks to continue providing an excellent user experience.

Our co-founders and team members bring a wealth of knowledge.

Co-founders Sanjay and Sharon met while working at Trucker Path, where they got their first introduction to the world of trucking. While scaling the product, they both formed a deep appreciation for the work that independent owner-operators and small fuel stops do, and recognized that they were largely being left out of certain benefits. In particular, Sanjay and Sharon were motivated to provide independent truckers with access to fuel discounts often given only to large fleets, while simultaneously providing small fuel stops with more customers. Enter Mudflap! Since then, they’ve been focused on building an excellent team and a product that truly helps truckers.

Our team members come from a wide range of companies including Meta, Postmates, Lyft, MasterCard, American Express, Sephora, Varo Money, Optimizely, and more. However, we know that “impressive” is more than just a company name. For example, Vineet, one of our engineers, appreciates the care, attention, and detail paid to good engineering practices and clean code: “What I find impressive is the fact that people on the team not only care about their work but also feel a shared sense of responsibility toward anything that is shipped. As teams grow, this isn’t easy to scale and people start sticking to their ‘area,’ but so far the team is full of people who care about this, and it’s evident from the comments on pull requests.”

Everyone shares a commitment and passion to create a product that is used by thousands, in an industry that impacts millions. As Gabriel, one of our software engineers, says, “There’s a high level of teamwork, curiosity, and critical thinking; everyone uses these skills to constantly make things better while also adding their unique touch.” If you’re interested in learning, growing, and building, regardless of your background and years of experience, then we want to hear from you!

Silos are actively avoided.

As an early-stage startup, team members have individual focuses, but we don’t really have departments. It’s important that everyone is connected to everything happening at the company; we embrace cross-functional collaboration because we believe it’s the best way to operate internally and deliver the best overall experience for our customers. For releases and changes, everyone has a hand in making a new feature happen. Engineers work in relatively small pods that are cross-functional in nature. These groups include mobile engineers, backend engineers, product managers, and members of the marketing or support teams depending on the project. As a new hire, you can expect to interact with other departments on a daily basis. For example, the development team often collaborates with external teams: Nichol reaches across the aisle to work with customer success to drive customer engagement; Suhaib pulls in other departments to ensure that our truckers get the experience that will best serve them; Thomas dives deep into fraud prevention working with our data team, and the list goes on. This format ensures we communicate often and share a common vision, mission, and goals.

What’s more, as a remote-first company, we know open communication and strong documentation is paramount. Engineers largely work asynchronously over Slack and Google Docs. That said, we also recognize that there is a lot of value to live problem solving, and team members meet via Zoom for those discussions. There are also periodic, optional in-person meetings in the Bay Area for both work-related conversations and social gatherings.

If transforming a vital economic industry in a fast-moving environment with a high degree of creativity, ownership, and collaboration speaks to you, check out our open roles!